When Maryland's new open-meetings law takes effect next July, no one in the state will be happier than Nancy McCaffrey, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two who has crusaded for openness in government in the small community of Poolesville since she moved there in 1983.

Poolesville, about thirty-five miles northwest of Washington, had won a reputation as the state's worst offender when it comes to shutting the public out of discussions of public issues. Now -- much to the chagrin of the town's commissioners -- it's getting some of the credit for bringing about one of the tougher open-meetings laws in the U.S.

What irked McCaffrey was that the commissioners, in closed-door sessions after public meetings, would discuss matters far beyond the personnel issues and other items permitted to be discussed privately by the old Maryland Open Meetings Law -- a statute that was widely viewed by the state's journalists as weak and ambiguous. As for the local press, "We have editorially screamed and yelled," says Carol Blackburn, managing editor of the weekly Poolesville Gazette. "But we never [went to court] because nothing [the commissioners did] looked to us as if it really made a big difference." For a time the commissioners would include in the minutes of their meetings the items they had discussed in closed sessions, but that practice ended abruptly when McCaffrey and others complained that many of those topics should be publicly discussed.

"What they were discussing was often trivial, such as an Eagle Scout award, but sometimes it was very important -- such as the status of grant applications for sewer work in town," says McCaffrey, who testified three times on behalf of the new open-meetings law at legislative hearings in Annapolis early this year.

Charles W. Elgin, Sr., the strong-willed, seventy-six-year-old president of Poolesville's commissioners, has little patience for McCaffrey. "We have a few people who continually snipe at the commissioners over anything that comes up," says Elgin. He adds that nonsensitive matters, such as the Eagle Scout item, sometimes come up unexpectedly -- and innocently -- in closed session.

One particularly sensitive issue, a hefty property tax increase for Poolesville, was revealed to the public last spring via a legal notice, and not in public session, according to McCaffrey and newspaper accounts. That seemed to galvanize opposition to the closed-session strategy, although Elgin insists that the tax hike was discussed in public.

Whatever the truth, the new open-meetings law makes it much harder for local governments like Poolesville's to do business in private. Some provisions of the law, which was written by a lobbyist for the news media, were actually strengthened by the legislature, much to the delight of journalists. The law not only tightens the old language but places more quasi-governmental bodies, such as advisory committees, under its jurisdiction. Another unusual feature is the establishment of a three-member Open Meetings Compliance Board to hear complaints and gather data about meetings closed to the press and public. According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, just three states -- Connecticut, Hawaii, and New York -- have similar review panels in place.

Jim Keat, assistant managing editor of the Baltimore Sun, and Tom Marquardt, managing editor of the Annapolis Capitol, both noted that the open meetings bill might have failed had it not been for the surprising solidarity demonstrated by the state's news media, which lobbied hard for the bill. "I think we realized it was an idea whose time has come," Keat says.

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